Do Your Part – Shelter in Place

Staying home and limiting physical contact with across the board is the best thing you can do help contain a pandemic.

After the first case of covid-19, the disease caused by the new strain of coronavirus, was announced in the United States, reports of further infections trickled in slowly. Two months later, that trickle has turned into a steady current.

This so-called exponential curve has experts worried. If the number of cases were to continue to double every three days, there would be about a hundred million cases in the United States by May.

That is math, not prophecy. The spread can be slowed, public health professionals say, if people practice “social distancing” by avoiding public spaces and generally limiting their movement.

Still, without any measures to slow it down, covid-19 will continue to spread exponentially for months. To understand why, it is instructive to simulate the spread of a fake disease through a population.

We will call our fake disease simulitis. It spreads even more easily than covid-19: whenever a healthy person comes into contact with a sick person, the healthy person becomes sick, too.

Companies are trying to renegotiate their office and retail leases, and in some cases refusing to pay. This has given rise to fierce negotiations with building owners, who worry about their own survival.

Bake'n Babes, the Tampa bakery known for its over-the-top milkshakes and massive chocolate chip cookies, will permanently operate out of Gen-X Tavern in downtown Tampa. The bakery, which was previously inside The Hall on Franklin, moved to the Gen-X Tavern when both the Hall and the Gen-X Tavern were shuttered by the coronavirus pandemic. With […]